At the Centre of my Heart

It is difficult to explain what it means to spend a year trying to help keep a place alive.

When I first came to the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga, I thought I was coming to work in marketing at a yoga centre. I did not understand that I was walking into a living experiment that had been unfolding for more than fifty years, built around the idea that yoga could be more than something you practise for an hour and then leave behind. Here, yoga is in the kitchen and the garden, in morning practice, satsang and yajna, but also in meetings, dishes, spreadsheets, disagreements, laughter, retreat registrations, cleaning, teaching, and figuring out how thirty very different human beings can live and work together. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, there is Babaji.

 

Living here helped me understand why it matters that teachings are carried carefully from one generation to another, and why something is lost when yoga becomes only movement, wellness and aesthetics. I have watched people who knew Baba Hari Dass personally continue to care for this land and these teachings decades later, and I think that is what I love most about this place. People care, sometimes almost unbearably much. They care about how vegetables are grown, how guests are welcomed, the quality of a retreat container, the teachings, the land and each other. They care deeply about Babaji and what he intended. Sometimes all of this caring makes things more complicated, not less, but there is something moving about being surrounded by people who have given so much of their lives to something they believe in.

For the past year, much of my work has been trying to translate this care to the outside world. How do you market a place that does not really want to be marketed? How do you make something culturally relevant without destroying the very thing that makes it valuable? Those questions became my work. I photographed retreats, made reels, wrote newsletters, built campaigns and interviewed teachers. I listened to stories about Babaji, tried to understand why some retreats filled and others did not, watched registrations and worried about revenue. I went deep into rooms and meals, social media, email subject lines and ads. But the most important thing I got to watch was people. I watched people arrive tired and leave softer, and somewhere along the way I realised that I was not really marketing retreats. I was trying to help people find this place.

ACYR made this especially clear to me. Watching generations of this community return to the land reminded me that the Centre is much bigger than any organisational chart, marketing strategy, financial year or single person. People have loved this place for decades. Children have grown up here, teachers have been found here, marriages and friendships have begun here. People have practised, grieved, celebrated and returned here again and again. There is something powerful about being part of a place that existed long before you arrived and, hopefully, will continue long after you leave.

Loving the Centre has also taught me that love does not require believing something is perfect. This year was not always easy. I watched people leave, roles change and responsibilities become unclear. I watched a small organisation try to carry enormous expectations with limited money and limited people. I learned how easily seva and overwork can become confused, especially when people care deeply about a mission. There were times I was frustrated and times I was exhausted. There were times I wanted everything to move faster and times I wished everything would slow down. There were meetings where I genuinely wondered how an organisation dedicated to yoga could possibly be this complicated. Maybe that was part of the teaching too.

Living in a spiritual community did not show me a world without ego, politics, conflict, attachment, fear or misunderstanding. It showed me all of those things up close and then asked me to practise anyway. I began to understand what it means to have boundaries without closing my heart, to disagree without making someone an enemy, and to recognise where service ends and self-abandonment begins. I began to see the difference between humility and silence, and to understand that devotion to an institution is not the same thing as devotion to God. I suspect these lessons will stay with me longer than many things I have learned in an asana class.

And underneath all of this complexity, there has been so much beauty. The stars on clear nights, the animals, the quiet mornings, fruit hanging heavily from the trees, and the changing seasons on this piece of land. There were yajnas and satsangs, music and laughter, and evenings gathered around a fire in the orchard. My bhakti grew here more than I expected. I came with a spiritual practice, but I leave with a deeper relationship to Shiva, Hanuman and Kali, to prayer, discipline and service. I also leave with a simpler understanding of spirituality. It is not only found in extraordinary experiences. It is found in how we work, how we treat people, how we respond when things become difficult, when we apologise, when we speak up, and when we choose to let go.

For a year, I got to live inside this experiment, and in a strange way I think the Centre has prepared me to leave it too. Yoga was never supposed to make us dependent on a particular place. Eventually, we have to take the practice with us. I do not know exactly what the Centre will become, and I have spent much of this year thinking about that question. How does a traditional yoga centre survive financially in 2026? How does it welcome a younger generation that is hungry for meaning but suspicious of institutions? How does it honour Baba Hari Dass without becoming frozen in time? How does it protect what is sacred while still changing enough to survive?

I still believe the answer is somewhere inside what already makes this place extraordinary. It does not need to abandon discipline or lineage or become another wellness resort. Perhaps it simply needs to become brave enough to show people what actually happens here. In a culture obsessed with improving and optimising ourselves, there is still a place on a small Canadian island asking people to practise, serve, study, live simply and look inward. That is more than interesting. I think it is needed.

I am confident that the Centre will become financially strong enough that survival does not consume so much of its energy. I hope young people discover it. I hope the next generation asks difficult questions and the older generation keeps telling its stories. I hope the teachings remain bigger than the personalities carrying them. Most of all, I hope people continue arriving here without fully understanding why they came, only to realise later that something inside them changed. I hope years from now someone walks onto this land for the first time and feels what so many people before them have felt: there is something here.

I came to Salt Spring to work in marketing. I leave having learned about community, leadership, money, power, boundaries, service, devotion, lineage, human nature and God. That seems like a very good return on a one-year contract.

Thank you to the people who fed me, taught me, challenged me, disagreed with me, practised beside me, worked beside me, danced with me and made me laugh. Thank you for giving me a place to work honestly, meditate, meet people without fear and play. Thank you for letting me serve something I genuinely believe deserves to exist.

And thank you for teaching me that loving something does not always mean staying. Sometimes we are given a place for a season. We let it change us, we give something of ourselves to it, and when it is time to go, we carry what it taught us with us.

Maybe that is how places like this survive. Not only because people stay and care for them for decades, but because people leave too. They take the teachings into different homes, cities, families and communities, and allow them to shape the way they live. I came here wondering how to help keep this place alive. I leave understanding that keeping a place alive can also mean carrying something of it into the world.

With love and gratitude,

Ranju